A friendship born at Williams in the early 1990s has had a tremendous effect on health care in rural Africa. In December, a nonprofit founded by the two classmates will announce the first winner of the Gerson L’Chaim Prize, a $500,000 award given to someone who moved to Africa to provide medical care to the poor—and who has been doing that work already for a considerable period of time.

Jon Fielder ’94 is a medical doctor and Christian missionary in Kenya, where he’s lived since 2002. Mark Gerson ’94 was trained at Yale Law School, now runs several businesses, and is a devout Jew. They met their freshman year, became close over long conversations at the snack bar, and stayed in touch through medical and law school.

Gerson says he was always impressed by Fielder’s intellectual curiosity and moral commitments. When Fielder took a year off from medical school to work with Mother Theresa in Calcutta, Gerson says, “his need and desire to serve the poor was an inspiration.”

So in 2002, when Fielder had completed his residency at Johns Hopkins and was planning to serve as a medical missionary in Kenya, Gerson made what would be the first of many philanthropic donations to Fielder’s work. “His donations to support HIV-infected patients at the hospital started before I even arrived,” Fielder says.

Gerson explains that even when he couldn’t give very much, he was committed to supporting his friend’s work, and he knew that “if Jon said my philanthropic dollars would have an effect, I could absolutely trust him.”

The problems Fielder faced in rural Kenya were enormous. When he arrived at Kijabe Hospital, deep in an escarpment in the Great Rift Valley, he was the only member of the staff who knew how to treat HIV. Medical supplies were limited, and the medicine that could prolong the lives of HIV-positive patients was impossibly expensive.

“Thanks to Mark’s early gifts, we were able to establish a subsidy program through which patients paid what they could afford, and the hospital paid the rest,” Fielder says. Within a few years, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief provided those medicines for free, and Gerson’s gifts—along with those of others he and Fielder brought together, including Sean Fieler ’95—were directed at bigger-picture problems, such as a lack of facilities and trained personnel in the region.

In 2010, Gerson and Fielder established the African Mission Healthcare Foundation (AMHF). The AMHF has built clinics around Kenya and in other countries; established a medical-personnel training program; and supported other medical missionaries doing similar work to Fielder.

When asked why this type of philanthropy is so important to him, Gerson says, “The Torah tells us 36 times to love the stranger, and who is more of a stranger than people suffering from TB or AIDS or any number of disabilities in a rural African village?”

Since founding AMHF, Fielder has helped train thousands of physician’s assistants and nurses, who now work in clinics around Kenya and Malawi. “It is amazing to think that a dozen years ago, I was the only person at Kijabe who could treat HIV, and now there all of these people doing that work in clinics located much closer to where the patients actually live,” he says.

But the fact remains that in many regions, doctors like Fielder are the only health care providers for thousands of local residents. “It is obvious to me that the work these medical missionaries do is completely extraordinary,” Gerson says of the four finalists for the prize. “They have devoted their whole lives to it, they moved there and they don’t ever leave. But they don’t see themselves as extraordinary.”

Gerson and Fielder hope the prize, which will be awarded annually, brings recognition to the work these medical missionaries are doing and encourages others to donate.

“Resources for health can stretch much farther in Africa than they do in America,” Fielder says. “These doctors have been in Africa for a long time, the hospitals have been there a long time. Our focus is to support that kind of longitudinal institution building, because of the huge effects those institutions have on the populations they serve.”

To learn more about the AMHF or the four Gerson L’Chaim Prize finalists, visit http://www.amhf.us/.

Over the course of the intimate, 90-minute show, he performed a mix of old and new hits, including some he wrote as a student at Williams, singing in both Chinese and English, and showcasing a blend of musical styles and his talent in piano, acoustic guitar, and violin.

At various points throughout the concert, he shared the stage with Williams students and alumni, including tenor saxophonist Adam Sterns ’98 and several current and former members of the Springstreeters, the all-male a cappella group Wang belonged to as a student. In keeping with Springstreeters’ custom, the group closed the show with “Our Song.”

Wang is known as the “King of Chinese Pop” and one of the most influential musicians in China. He has released 15 solo albums and is the best-selling Mandarin-language musician of his generation.

He has won four of Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards and 15 Chinese Music Awards, and he has also acted in several movies, including Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The night before his Williams performance, Wang was in Boston to receive an honorary doctorate of music from the Berklee College of Music and perform at Symphony Hall accompanied by international students.

His Williams concert drew more than 550 students, faculty, staff, and alumni. They lined up early to get seats, and the excitement was palpable.

Among a group of self-described “super fans” was Linda Chu ’14 of New York City. “This is a dream come true,” said Chu, who returned to campus for the first time since her graduation specifically for the concert. “I’ve been waiting for this moment since I learned he was an alum from Williams.”

Yuqi Ji, a visiting language fellow in the Asian studies department, said he’s been a fan of Wang’s since middle school, though “it was too expensive to see him perform in China.” He was excited to see Wang live for the first time.

Carol Wu ’18, a comparative literature major, said Wang “totally lived up to my expectations. His live singing sounds exactly like his CD, and he really displayed his musical abilities as well as a strong grasp of the atmosphere. Very charismatic. I think I turned into a fan after Monday.”

Wu was also excited to see herself in the video that Wang’s wife shot after the show and posted on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to Twitter.

Wang, who was raised in Rochester, N.Y., learned to speak Mandarin at Williams and double-majored in music and Asian studies at Williams. In addition to the Springstreeters, he belonged to Cap & Bells, and by the time he graduated, he’d already released four albums. He received an honorary degree from Williams in June 2016. That weekend he took part in a conversation with his former professors, W. Anthony Sheppard, professor of music, and Andy Jaffe, the Lyle B. Clay Artist in Residence in Jazz and senior lecturer in music.

Video and photos from Wang’s concert will be shared soon. Read a review of the concert in The Williams Record.

With the departure of three long-time members of the physics department and the arrival of three newcomers, physics at Williams is in the midst of a transition. Physics professor and former dean of the college Sarah Bolton was named president of the College of Wooster, a post she took up this fall. And at the end of this year, professors Jefferson Strait and William Wootters will both retire.

Coming in the door over the next year are three new faculty members. Catherine Kealhofer arrived this fall and is teaching Electricity and Magnetism this semester. Kealhofer, an experimental physicist, recently completed postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany. Her work involves the development of tools for ultrafast electron diffraction.

“In ultrafast physics, we’re trying to get insight into processes that happen on the time-scale that atoms are vibrating in solids,” says Kealhofer, who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University. “These vibrations might happen a trillion times a second—a rate that is almost difficult to imagine.”

To get a picture of ultrafast changes, Kealhofer develops tools for making ultrafast electron pulses. “A next step in electron microscopy is to be able to look at atomic-scale structure as it changes,” she says. To do that, she develops short-pulsed electron sources that can provide a picture of the process at a specific moment.

“When you take a photograph of something that’s moving fast, and your shutter speed isn’t fast enough, the image is blurred,” she says. “One way to get around that is using stroboscopic illumination, where your shutter stays open in a dark environment. The state of the system during the brief flash is what’s recorded.”

Kealhofer likens a regular electron microscope to the camera with the slow shutter. The continuous electron beam generates a blurry image of a process as it’s happening, but short electron pulses can record a sharp picture of the changing system. “This technique lets us watch a movie of a phase transition, such as the melting of a solid,” she says.

To generate these short electron pulses and observe what’s happening at ultrafast time scales, Kealhofer has to set up her research lab. “Setting up a lab at a small college is challenging because on day one you start with an empty room,” says physics chair David Tucker-Smith. “Undergraduates can be very helpful—and it’s an extraordinary experience for them—but they have to be trained. We were excited to find stellar faculty with ambitious lab programs and the talent to mentor students in establishing those labs.”

Next to arrive in the department is theoretical physicist Swati Singh, who comes in the spring. Singh earned her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She will teach Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.

“Singh’s research output is quite broad in scope, encompassing theoretical studies of quantum effects in disparate physical systems,” says Tucker-Smith. “Most recently she and her collaborators have been investigating the possibility of using superfluid helium to detect gravitational waves.”

And next fall, Kate Jensen will arrive after completing postdoctoral research at ETH Zurich. Jensen, who earned her Ph.D. at Harvard, is an experimentalist who is interested in probing materials in order to better understand them. “Jensen’s work has an applied bent and will be interesting to a broad range of students, including some who might want to go into engineering,” says Tucker-Smith.

“Each of these faculty members brings a new focus to the physics department, complementing the research currently being done here, and also adding to it tremendously,” says Tucker-Smith.

“At a time when women continue to be underrepresented in physics, it is especially exciting to have hired three such talented women,” says Dean of the Faculty Denise K. Buell. “We are delighted to have been able to hire them as a cohort.”

On Halloween, Williams College staff filled the lower level of the Faculty Club to hear Deborah Brothers, costume designer and lecturer in theater, discuss her creations in the timely talk “Gowns and Monsters.”

The talk was the latest installment of the Faculty Research Luncheon for Staff series, held three times a year for the past 17 years. An opportunity for faculty to share their research, their projects, and their passions with staff from all over campus, the luncheon takes place over a meal of seasonal foods and camaraderie.

Recent topics have featured Professor of English Alison Case, who discussed Nelly Dean, her then-new novel based on WutheringHeights; Massachusetts Professor of Humanities Susan Dunn, who contextualized the 1940 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt; and Assistant Professor of Biology Matt Carter, who explored the neuroscience behind hunger.

Brothers, who has been at Williams since 1985, focused on her design process, highlighting costumes created for the college’s theater department, Shakespeare and Company, Calliope Theatre, and others. Her inspiration comes from all over—history books, archives, past productions, and pop culture. “I’m taking in what all of you are wearing right now,” she said to the luncheon attendees.

For a single costume, she’ll create a collage of images that reference colors, textures, time periods, character traits—and much more—that she develops into increasingly refined sketches that become the blueprint for the design. From conception of the piece through opening night and beyond, she fine tunes the costumes to fit the needs of the actors and the production, Brothers explained as she flipped through her oversized design books.

After her talk, Brothers opened the floor to questions. One staff member asked if a costume ever changes after its initial design. “Oh, yes,” Brothers said, gesturing to a dressmaking dummy clad in a harpy costume from a recent Shakespeare and Company production of The Tempest. At first, Brothers said, the design was too “Vegas” and not menacing enough. Reaching into the sleeves of the cape, she demonstrated how the actor playing the harpy and Ariel could use the rods inside as a wing-like extension of her arms.

Brothers explained that the actor needed to do a quick change onstage, so the costume had to come off easily. “Pulling a dress over your head is the least dramatic thing you can do,” she joked as, with a flourish, she yanked the harpy costume off the dummy to reveal Ariel’s dress underneath.

The staff who attend the luncheons enjoy getting a glimpse of what students experience with their professors in the classroom—or backstage. “The staff lunches let people learn about the nature of the complexity of other peoples’ jobs,” says Karen Gorss Benko, catalog librarian at Sawyer. “I learned how much more there is to costume design than fitting and sewing. Deborah makes connections that I never would have made, but when you see how it all comes together, it looks inevitable.”

Controller Sue Hogan says she tries to attend every lunch. “It is an insight into what the professors are teaching and what the students are learning,” she says. “I get to see and hear from people that I deal with in my job and understand more about what they are passionate about. I get a little taste of what the students are fortunate to have available to them.”

]]>Boots to Bookshttps://www.williams.edu/feature-stories/boots-to-books/
Tue, 01 Nov 2016 20:03:21 +0000http://www.williams.edu/?p=16545Continue reading "Boots to Books"]]>Williams welcomed two veterans to the Class of 2020 as part of a partnership with Service to School (S2S) and VetLink, which is designed to connect high-achieving veterans with some of the most selective colleges and universities in the country and mentor them through the application process.

Benton Leary ’20 grew up near Atlanta, Ga., where, he says, “I was liked by the teachers but knew I was joining the military and wanted to have fun until then.” He graduated with a vocational diploma before joining the U.S. Navy, where he served six years and achieved the rank of petty officer first class.

Though the military provided financial security, the grueling environment and the long hours equated to an hourly rate of less than minimum wage. Leary started researching civilian job opportunities that aligned with his interests, such as banking and consulting. “I started buying used economic textbooks and reading them,” he says. “I started asking questions [about economics] to college graduates.”

As Leary asked more questions, he heard the same message from people he trusted: Maybe you’ll find the answers in college. So he left the military to pursue an education.

Landon Marchant ’20 grew up in rural Wisconsin. He says college was financially out of reach, so “the only way out was to go to the military and get a skill.”

He joined the U.S. Air Force and was an airman first class. He accepted an honorable discharge after two years due to health issues and moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a plumber. “I was miserable, but I was very good at what I did,” he says.

In considering a college education, Marchant had Williams on his list. But, he says, “I had no idea how to show schools that I wanted to learn and was worth their time.” He reached out to S2S after someone from Williams recommended the program.

Both Leary and Marchant say S2S’s VetLink helped them achieve their goal of college, though Leary says it took some time before he realized he needed help with the process.

“The military teaches self reliance,” he says. “So I had that mentality going through for a while and didn’t get very far. I ended up reaching out to S2S when I felt myself starting to flounder. I filled out an application and got some help.”

A representative from S2S suggested Leary might appreciate Williams’ small, close-knit campus community. His experience during Previews—when prospective students have the chance to tour the campus, visit classes, and meet other students—helped solidify his decision to join the Class of 2020.

Leary says Williams’ extensive academic resources are evidence of the college’s commitment to student success. “My experience has exceeded everything I imagined college would be,” he says. “It’s imperative to get the word out to other veterans through programs like S2S to help them understand the opportunity that’s here.”

For Marchant, Williams is a dream school. “The professors have met me where I am, and I haven’t once felt like my military and trades background was a detriment,” he says. “My professors don’t care that my starting point is different from other students. They care that I’m putting in the work and want to learn.”

Attending Williams, Marchant says, feels “like coming home to a place I’d never been before.”

Williams students will have several opportunities this year to improve their financial literacy, thanks to a new program called MOOLA.

The program offers both in-person sessions and online training on a variety of financial topics, including how to make the most of meal-plan dollars, understanding the tax system, paying for graduate school, and the art of negotiation. Six sessions have been scheduled for the fall semester, with another four planned for Winter Study and seven in the spring semester.

“With MOOLA, we’re proactively speaking about real issues and preparing our students to be fiscally responsible,” says Rosanna Reyes, associate dean of the college and dean of first-gen initiatives. “Students can spend an hour at one of our events and walk away with a practical tool to improve their financial well-being.”

At a recent session, students learned the ins and outs of the college’s meal plans—including the cost per meal and cost per missed meal—and how those costs relate to financial aid.

“It’s reassuring to know all the different ways I can pay off my balance that don’t involve altering my meal plan,” said one first-year student who attended the session. “It was so helpful to understand the differences between meal plans—some just didn’t make sense for me, financially.”

To increase participation, the program offers food and prizes at each session. MOOLA also makes available to students CashCourse.org, a free, web-based education tool run by the National Endowment for Financial Education.

A collaboration among campus offices including the dean of the college, student life, human resources, the health center and the economics department, MOOLA is intended for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Ultimately, the goal of the program is to alleviate the potential burden of financial stressors at school and at home.

“In the time I’ve been at Williams, I’ve met students who can do multivariable calculus but know nothing about variable-rate credit cards,” says Ben Leary ’20, who serves on MOOLA’s planning committee. “We need to do more to promote open discussions on issues of personal finance to ensure people can make informed decisions—just like we do for everything else at Williams.”

To learn more about MOOLA and view a list of sessions, visit http://student-life.williams.edu/moola/.

With apologies for stating the obvious, professor of political science Nicole Mellow says the 2016 election cycle is highly unusual—and not because of one out of the ordinary element, but the combination of many.

“We’ve never before elected a president with no record of public or military service to the country, yet Trump has captured a major party candidacy,” she says. “We’ve not seen in a long time the level of backlash against status quo politics that Trump—and Bernie Sanders in the primaries—represent. And yet the country seems poised to elect a ‘status quo’ candidate with very high ‘unfavorable’ ratings. But Hillary Clinton is anything but status quo as the first woman candidate nominated by a major party.”

Mellow suggests that the evident dissatisfaction with the status quo had been building for a while. “You can trace the Sanders and Trump momentum back to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party,” she says. “There has been evidence of upheaval and a growing distrust for political institutions for some time, and we’re now seeing that it has trickled up to the presidential contest.”

And she cautions that the election’s outcome is not the end of the story. “We see through history that there have been clear, uncontested losses that have nevertheless resulted eventually in significant victories for the defeated ideas,” she says. As one example, Mellow points to Barry Goldwater, who lost the 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson. While many media outlets have focused on how both Trump and Goldwater attracted fringe elements of their parties and were rejected by the Republican establishment, Mellow says they’re quite different from each other.

“Goldwater was an established and respected senator who articulated a coherent, conservative philosophy,” Mellow wrote in a recent blog post for the Miller Center. “He inspired a potent, innovative, and well-organized movement because of his commitment to those conservative principles, and he conducted himself with a principled integrity uncharacteristic of most politicians.”

Mellow asserts that after Goldwater lost the election, factors that contributed to his loss helped to bring about the success of modern Republican conservatism a few decades later. She’s co-authoring a book, due out this summer, with Jeffrey Tulis at the University of Texas, Austin, called Legacies of Losing in American Politics, in which they argue that there are several key political losses in American history that have had profound and unacknowledged effects on American political development.

“We have a popular narrative of progress in this county that sees unequivocal forward momentum toward our liberal ideals happening at key moments, such as the founding, the Civil War, and the New Deal,” says Mellow. “In our book, we show how each moment had an ‘anti-moment,’ where the loser in the defining battle actually achieved some significant success down the road. Collectively, these anti-moments temper the national story of progress.”

Should predictions of a Trump loss play out, the impact of his candidacy will likely still reverberate in American politics, Mellow says. She asserts in her blog post, “It is reasonable to assume that a Trump loss—and a Clinton win—will not spell the end of the political tempest of this past year. Instead, we are likely to see continued battles inside both parties.

“Trump has thrived in part on the currents of an anti-liberal tradition that our book makes clear is fundamental and still vibrant,” she adds. “All of this can be exploited by enterprising politicians in the coming elections.”

Nov. 10 marks 12 months since the college officially began its pursuit of Living Building Challenge (LBC) status for the Class of 1966 Environmental Center. The results are in: The building has met all but one of the seven rigorous requirements for full certification—that of using only the energy it produces and collects on-site.

Those involved in the project will submit data for the six other performance areas—beauty, equity, health, materials, site, and water—to pursue partial LBC certification in the spring. Meanwhile, they’ll be implementing changes and tracking data for a few more months in an effort to sustain 12 months of operation at net-zero energy and eventually achieve full certification.

The LBC, administered by the International Living Future Institute, is the most stringent measure of sustainability in the built environment. To receive certification, a building must demonstrate that it can live within its means, using only the electricity produced and water collected on-site and devoting 35 percent of its landscaping to food production, among other requirements.

“We didn’t expect it to be easy,” says Mike Evans, assistant director at the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives, which, along with the Center for Environmental Studies, has its home in the Class of 1966 Environmental Center. Currently, only 11 buildings in the world have received full LBC certification.

With heavy use of the center’s classrooms, kitchen, library, and meeting spaces expected from the outset, Williams approached the challenge of net-zero energy as a learning opportunity. When data showed higher than anticipated electricity use, in part because appliances were occasionally left on in the kitchen, the Zilkha Center began requiring training sessions and card-swipe access to use them.

Meanwhile, architects and engineers who have worked on other LBC projects are consulting with the Zilkha Center to determine why energy consumption continues to outpace production—and how best to address the imbalance.

And though the building is meeting the LBC’s water requirement—with use lower than expected—students and staff are continuing to study and refine the filtration system. All water used in the building comes from rainwater collected in an underground cistern, which must be treated. But filters have needed changing more frequently than anticipated.

Some of the building’s features have brought unexpected benefits. Rain gardens were built around the center to collect rainwater and slowly return it to the ground in an effort to avoid flooding of nearby college housing and Sawyer Library. Though water infiltration has been slower than expected, creating ponds, the gardens have prevented flooding. And the ponds themselves have attracted wildlife, including frogs, turtles, and ducks.

“The purpose of the building is to live in it and learn from it,” says Ralph Bradburd, CES chair and the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy. “The learning justifies the time, effort, and money we put into it.”

Evans agrees and says their sights are set on broader, lasting goals: “It’s not just about this building, but about the lessons we can learn and pass on.”

Two Williams sophomores participated in the inaugural summer of Girls Who Invest, a program providing young women with the chance to learn core investment management concepts and get hands-on work experience in the field. Sarah Hollinger ’19 and Isabella Wang ’19 were among the 30 students from around the country accepted into the program, which started out in classrooms at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, in late May.

Founded by Seema Hingorani, former chief investment officer for the New York City Retirement Systems, Girls Who Invest seeks to increase “the number of women in portfolio management and executive leadership in the asset management industry,” according to the organization’s website. “Our benchmark for success is to have 30 percent of the world’s investable capital managed by women by 2030.” Women currently manage less than 10 percent of the world’s investable capital.

Participants spent the month of June in the classroom with some of the top business faculty in the country. Each day during lunchtime, a different industry member came to speak to the group about her experiences. Wang says the speakers helped the young women contextualize the culture. “They spoke about the obstacles they face as women in the investment world but also about the fact that there is a community out there for us to join,” she says.

At the end of the month, the students were placed in six-week paid internships at investment firms all over the country. Wang went to Seattle to work at BMGI, and Hollinger went to Bloomberg in New York, where she worked in the trading solutions department.

“There’s an idea that investing isn’t noble work or that it doesn’t benefit people’s lives,” says Hollinger, who plans to double major in economics and environmental studies. “But we learned a lot about how investment management affects the infrastructure that gets created, and how that impacts people’s lives.”

Hollinger says Girls Who Invest helped give her the tools she’ll need to enter the industry after graduation. She hopes to go into sustainable investment work in the future, because, she says, “Our generation is going to have to deal with the damage to our environment. Investing as an industry is one of the vehicles we can utilize to improve the way we treat the earth.”

Collette Chilton, the college’s chief investment officer, says Williams students are uniquely qualified to succeed in investment management, and she hopes more women will apply for the program next year.

“Girls Who Invest offers the training our students need to read financial statements and complete analyses and build models,” Chilton says. “But when it comes to putting the numbers together and weaving a story—which is what investment management is all about—they are well suited to fit the pieces together because at Williams they’ve learned to think critically.”

Throughout the day, students will be hiking over Mount Greylock, grabbing lunch at the all-campus picnic, participating in an adventure race, and enjoying an evening polar bear swim, among other activities.

Check out the complete schedule of events on the Outing Club’s website, where’s there’s also information on activities throughout the year.

To find out more about the history of Mountain Day (which began more than 150 years ago as Chip Day and Gravel Day and has since evolved to the annual tradition of a spontaneous break from classes), take a look at this page from the college archives.